So I've been reading about infrared spectroscopy to detect the nutrients in the liquid. I have no clue how it works. I know for FT-IR you have, basically, a reference wavelength that you associate to a peak.
To do any kind of ICP is time consuming and expensive, considering I have around 56 water samples!!!
Dear Ghazaleh
I think these articles could give you useful information about fast analysis of nutrients in water:
http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rbcs/v35n2/v35n2a20.pdf
www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/8/1/14/pdf
Thank you for your answer but they also used ICP to determine the metals as far as I understood.
This is not a great number of samples, so hard to justify buying equipment and learning the analytical ropes. We had an an analytical chemist at my University (Dr. Pickett). He taught me much, how to be safe and follow detailed directions, and I helped him around the lab to reimburse him. We finally purchased our own equipment, but had hundreds of samples to run. In your position, probably finding a similar professor, or just cooperating with or paying a certified lab for this analysis Is what I would suggest. My lab work was several decades ago using atomic absorption and flame emission spectrometer, among other methods for water quality. There are also methods for storing and preserving samples, and the book Standard Methods for Analysis of Water and Wastewater is a good reference to review and follow. Trying to learn analytical chemistry without some help can be done, but would be difficult. There is much detail to attend to.
Ghazaleh... Flame emission and atomic absorption are the best choice. They relatively the most available equipment. They are reliable, precise and need no sample preparation other than acidifying the water with few drops of a mineral acid. Good luck...
I think the preparation of samples is time consuming. Otherwise, the atomic absorption and emission device can easily be measured. The fastest way to measure the phosphorus is to provide an auto-analyzer.
Dear Ghazaleh Chegini , this is very interesting question. The FT-IR Spectroscopy could be an alternative solution to infer some mineralogical and biochemical properties of the matter. Indeed, you can associate specific compounds to specific wavelengths. Some of these wavelengths are well known, but unfortunately some other are difficult to understand. Therefore, the information could be summarized by the spectrum, but you will need to correlated with another proxy. This is why, the usage of FT-IR spectroscopy is often associate with PLS regressions involving some elemental data for calibration dataset.
I’m joining this conversation very late and probably you already finished this work. However, I’m interested to know if you tried the FT-IR with your samples?
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